Build Date: Wed Apr 2 11:21:06 2025 UTC
You're not drunk if you can lie on the floor without holding on.
-- Dean Martin
Making the Planes Run On Time
2002-02-06 21:31:16
Staggering up from a holiday-binge induced coma, this correspondent fears a Rip Van Winkle hallucination because it's looking a lot like Italy... in 1939.
A few raghead camel-jockeys handed our Law & Order zealots their best hook for eviscerating the Constitution and Bill of Rights since McCarthyism. Defense is double-plus good and the Bush-Lite administration is merrily planning a full-on Military Industrial Complex orgy with every weapons system in sight - as though terrorists plot fielding tank divisions and supersonic fighters.
And of course they're also cutting taxes, too (mostly to the benefit of rich asshole buddies, as opposed to the rest of us), leading to deficit spending - which is a striking contrast to last year's guess at major budget surpluses. (The parallels to Enron's pump and dump are scary, but not very surprising.)
This is all more than mildly annoying, but what did we expect? We "elected" these people (or so they and a majority over at the Supreme Court tell us).
But it's all just money (even though it is _our_ money). Easy come, easy go, wasting our taxes is what government does best, so who cares - guns or pork? This would all be more or less business as usual (the Republicans give away money to the rich, then the Democrats give some to the poor and middle-class) except for the present assault on basic liberties, rights, and citizen data.
You read it right, bucko: "All your data are belong to us" - sayeth the Feds. Their pretense for this is the claim that cross-indexing every scrap of your data - all your purchases, where you live and with whom (for ten years or so), your education, drivers licenses and vehicle tags, arrests and misdemeanors, civil actions, credit information, even IP addresses, web posts, and email - will enable them to single out "suspicious" airline passengers, preemptively.
All of your data will be fed into a web of interconnected databases to track your every move, record your every public act, and log your every statement, "private" or not - all for a dubious justification of making airplanes safe.
A parallel initiative put forward by the desperate corporate bastards running the airlines would let people submit to "voluntary" background checks to get exempted from obnoxious security checks at airports. It's bad enough that a government agency wants to shred our privacy and Constitutional protections, but having airlines extort our privacy to avoid draconian security checks is simply an unconscionable proposition. Here comes a stratified class society courtesy of an unholy collusion between "our" (yeah right) government and a cabal of bigass overleveraged airlines desperately seeking to create profits.
In the 1930's sometime, Mussolini said "Corporatism is Fascism." Of course he meant that as a recommendation for Fascism, but it was perceptive of him. And after all - as was said in Chamberlain's Britain all too glad to appease the Axis Powers way back in those days - fascism made the trains run on time.
When my recreational drugs run out, I'm going to get me some Greyhound stock.
T O P S T O R I E S
California Glory Hole attracts huge crowds
A glory hole at Napa's Lake Berryessa is drawing huge crowds. According to Chris Lee, the general manager for the Solano County Water Agency, the glory hole hasn't been active since 2019, and only restarted operations on Feb 4. (More...)
Republican State Senator busted after soliciting a teenage girl
Republican State Senator Justin Eichorn of Minnesota was arrested for soliciting a teen girl on Monday just hours after he introduced a bill proposing "Trump derangement syndrome" (TDS) as a form of mental illness. (More...)
Parents claim measles is not that bad after having only one child die
The parents of a Texas girl who died from the measles are defending their decision not to vaccinate their daughter. "She says they would still say 'Don't do the shots,'" an unidentified translator for the parents said. "They think it’s not as bad as the media is making it out to be." (More...)
Delusional rich man tries to fire town staff
"I'm mayor now" said write-in mayoral candidate and founder of Pirate’s Booty Snacks Robert Ehrlich after losing the election for Mayor of Sea Cliff, NY. Then he tried to take over the Village Hall and fire everyone. (More...)
Musk claims Xitter security is staffed by idiots
Earlier this month Xitter experienced a massive outage. In an interview, Musk told Fox Business that he believes the attack came from "IP addresses originating in the Ukraine area." (More...)
The Future Ain't What It Used To Be
Ideas have taken horrifying shape and rooted into our modern reality. (More...)
C L A S S I C P I G D O G
A Day in the Life of a Beverotologist
It was starting to look like a very boring Saturday, trapped as I was in the suburban wastelands of the outer Bay Area, so I called my Able Assistant (AA) and proposed that we perform some Spocktail field tests. For some time I've been working on creating the quintessential cinematic beverage and even tho' SMRL does most of its testing during nocturnal hours, this seemed an opportune time to roll up the sleeves of our labcoats and get some science done. While the beverotology creation tested this day (The Neurotoxin) must be deemed a success, this article focuses more the journey of the experimenters, rather then the science of beverotology. (More...)
Spock Went, Spock Wrote, Spock Kicked Ass
Every Labor Day weekend a large portion of the PDJ staff joins 30,000 other freaks at one of the biggest and strangest art festivals in the world - Burning Man - somewhere on the edge of the Black Rock Desert. Our base of operations is always the ultra swank Spock Mountain Research Labs - the World Leaders in Beverage Science and Leisure Technology. This year, we hauled up our computers, printers and a massive digital duplicator, determined to become Black Rock City's third daily newspaper. Even Spock was surprised by our success - news will never be viewed the same on the playa. Read all seven issues of the 2002 Spock Science Monitor for yourself and see why. (More...)
It was the night of the Leonid meteor showers -- the perfect opportunity to break out the evil opaline liquor, get madder than hatters, and test wireless ethernet hardware... Would the plunging meteorites interfere with the 2.4GHz band? What about our delicate brain waves? (More...)
It’s election night. My wife and I are holed-up in this hotel that my political party has rented out for the evening. Outside, people are being violently beaten for whom they voted for. Is this South Africa? Perhaps we’re in Haiti or some Southern state during the 60’s. Of all the places where this sort of thing happens, it’s mind-boggling that we are in Portland, Maine. (More...)
Patient Joab's scientifick editorial discusses aspect of the space-time-beer continuum never before processed by sub-bush-robot minds!!! Too fabulantastic to contempulate! (More...)
Skunk School -- Learn Why Not To Keep Skunks As Pets
There is an alarming trend in pet purchasing habits this fall. People inspired by the WWII film, "Life is Beautiful" -- the one with that annoying Italian guy -- are buying descented skunks by the millions. (More...)